Here comes the sun

Consider: The sunlight that hits the earth in one hour contains more potential energy than the whole world uses in one year. Even so, America still relies on petroleum-based fuels to create most of its energy. Coal is the nation’s workhorse, creating 52 percent of our power needs, while oil, natural gas and the nuclear industry provide another 40 percent of the electricity that brews our coffee, cools our houses, lights up our televisions and makes our refrigerators hum.

But try not to breath too deeply while enjoying these wonders of modern technology. You see, the same activities that bring electricity into your home also release into the atmosphere each year 2.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, 9.9 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide and 4.6 million tons of nitrogen oxides.

And yet solar power, a proven, clean and infinitely abundant source of power, continues to provide only .02 percent of the energy Americans consume. How can this be?

Thirty years ago President Jimmy Carter tried to wean us off foreign oil and other fossil fuels by encouraging the development and use of renewable sources of energy. He offered financial incentives and tax breaks to those willing to give it a try. In response to the 1970s oil crises, Carter called for a goal of 20 percent renewable-energy use by 2000. As a gesture of his commitment, he had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House.

But in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president, and almost immediately upon taking office he began to dismantle Carter’s energy reform by slashing the incentives and ending the tax breaks. In 1986, workmen removed the solar panels from the White House to do some roof repairs. They were never replaced.

In little more than half a decade, Reagan had eclipsed Carter’s fledgling solar revolution and, in doing so, helped plunge America back into the dark well of fossil-fuel consumption and reliance on the volatile Middle East for a good part of our energy needs. Today, four years after passing Carter’s stated goal of 20 percent renewable energy by 2000, those alternative sources account for only 2 percent of the energy the country uses to create electricity, and only 1 percent of that is solar. In California, we’re a bit better, tapping into renewable sources for about 10 percent of our energy, but less than 1 percent of that comes from the sun.

Over the last decade or two the reality of what we’ve been doing to the atmosphere through coal and oil consumption has manifested in the phenomenon called global warming. While the current administration may say it doesn’t believe in such fairy tales of science, the country’s insurance companies do. Each year they find themselves writing more and more checks to cover property damage caused by weather-related natural disasters that are most likely triggered by the earth’s warming atmosphere.

The Reinsurance Association of America, the trade group for the companies that insure insurance companies, has urged government action on global warming. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the five costliest years for insurance payouts in America for floods and storms came in the 1990s.

One upside to America’s being run by such corporations as insurance companies, however, is that when they feel the pinch, things start to happen.

Today, two oil-related wars and trillions of tons of air pollutants after Carter looked to the sun, we’re basically where we were 25 years ago. But in 2002 California Gov. Gray Davis (remember him?) signed legislation requiring the state’s utility companies to provide 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2017.

The revolution has begun, albeit a few decades delayed.

Nowhere is this move to renewable energies more evident than right here in Butte County, where the city of Oroville can boast of utilizing more solar energy per person than any community on earth. The city has solar installations running its police and fire headquarters and City Hall, its public works yard, the Pioneer Museum and the State Theater.

Two years ago the Sewerage Commission Oroville Region installed the first solar-powered wastewater treatment plant in the country.

Chico is not far behind. On Aug. 7, the city will officially dedicate its first solar-power system, which sits on top of the downtown parking structure. It will provide 80 percent of the power the building uses for a police substation, two elevators and lights.

And by the end of the month Butte County will officially turn on its $8.4 million solar-power system to provide electricity to three county buildings—the Sheriff’s Office and both wings of the jail and the county offices. The system is the fifth-largest such operation in the country and 17th-largest in the world, producing enough electricity to power about 750 homes.

Jimmy Carter would be proud.

This solar revolution couldn’t come at a better time. During the past few summers in California demand for electricity has at times exceeded supply, resulting in brownouts and panic, and we’re far from out of the woods.

During a July heat wave a few weeks back, the state came dangerously close to an energy breakdown when it experienced three consecutive days of record electricity use. And energy experts say the situation will get even worse over the next two years as demands continue to grow while supplies stay stagnant or even decline due to competition with neighboring states and a steadily increasing population.

In June, a group called North State Renewable Energy announced its formation here in Butte County with the mission of “promoting the application of renewable energy and conservation best practices and technology in the public, private and nonprofit sectors in our region.”

The organization was put together by Scott McNall, the Chico State University provost, and Chico City Councilman Dan Nguyen-Tan and includes among its members Mark Stemen, a professor of environmental studies at Chico State. Nguyen-Tan and Stemen recently sat down and talked with the News & Review.

Stemen is an environmentalist, an outdoorsy kind of guy given to wearing straw hats and baggy shorts. He sees green possibilities nearly everywhere he looks, and his enthusiasm often rubs off on his students, many of whom have become active locally in environmental issues.

“The solar people call where we live ‘the sun corridor,’ “ said Stemen. “From Redding to Fresno gets as much sun as any municipal areas in the country. We are on par with Phoenix. … There are places in Death Valley that get more sun than we do, but people don’t live there for a reason. For cities we are as sunny as it gets. Why aren’t we tapping into that?”

Stemen sees more than just a source of power in the solar revolution. He sees a whole new energy-based economy.

“We’re always talking in this town about building jobs into the economy, but everybody keeps shooting for the low-end jobs. Here is an opportunity to build a clean economy on the fusion of dust. [Scientist] Avery Lovins once said, ‘We didn’t leave the stone age because we ran out of stones.’ And we are not going to leave the oil age because we are running out of oil; we are going to leave it because this is a better way.”

The cost of electricity, he said, will continue to climb as long as we keep relying on the same sources for its generation. He said we’re close to hitting “Hubbert’s peak.”

M. King Hubbert was an oil geologist who in 1956 predicted U.S. petroleum production would peak in the early 1970s and then decline. Turns out he was right. Today oil extraction in the lower 48 states is less than half of what it was in 1970.

In 1974 Hubbert said the world’s oil fields would hit their maximum production peak in 2000. His calculations were later revised to say the peak would come sometime between 2006 and 2010.

“Once we hit Hubbert’s peak, prices start to rise dramatically,” Stemen said. “Nigeria right now is an oil exporter, but their increase in consumption is now greater than their increase in export. At some point Nigeria will switch from being an oil exporter to an oil importer. As soon as that starts happening, the prices are going to start skyrocketing.”

While Stemen is the environmentalist, Nguyen-Tan is more of a policy wonk, a Harvard-educated numbers man. He’s a bit more diplomatic than Stemen. Where the professor is quick to quote a wise-cracking philosopher or environmentalist, Nguyen-Tan, more the politician, is measured and careful about what he says. They make an effective team.

“This is just the first project in the city of Chico,” Nguyen-Tan said of the parking structure project. “For the last year and a half the city Public Works Department has done a comprehensive review of all public facilities and narrowed it down to about two or three where we really feel like we can really save significant dollars.”

Nguyen-Tan was hesitant to take credit for or talk about how the city got interested in solar. He didn’t want to politicize the matter.

But soon after he was elected nearly four years ago, Nguyen-Tan broached the subject of installing solar systems on some city buildings and facilities. He said he initially did some research, crunched some numbers and brought his findings to the attention of then-Mayor Rick Keene, now Chico’s representative in the state Assembly.

Nguyen-Tan quickly learned that, like Reagan 25 years ago, Keene was not interested in this new-fangled technology. Keene, a conservative and at the time head of the council’s Finance Committee, most likely dismissed solar power as a dreamy counterculture alternative to the hard-and-fast reality of the status quo—burning oil and natural gas and tapping the rivers with environmentally destructive hydroelectric dams.

But rather than let the idea of solar-power energy die, the earnest and young Nguyen-Tan took his ideas to the city staff and waited until the politically ambitious Keene had moved on to Sacramento before bringing solar possibilities back to the council.

“What’s great is that the entire council has been supportive,” Nguyen-Tan said. “Keene refused to even look at it. I figured I’m not going to push this publicly but will push it at the city [staff] level, so when the votes are there the city will be ready. And that is exactly what happened.

“When Rick went off to the Assembly, I became chair of the Finance Committee, and I started pushing it. I made sure [Councilman] Larry Wahl understood, it. Now he’s a champion, and if Larry Wahl wants to take all the credit for this, that is fine, that is success.”

The first results of this foray into solar conversion is the downtown parking structure, which is somewhat ironic in that construction of the three-story lot turned into a bitter political fight between conservative pro-business types who wanted it and the liberal slow-growthers who did not.

In a way it’s appropriate that the structure became the city’s first solar project, because it shows how the image of solar energy has changed in the last 30 years. During the 1970s, solar was seen as a stand-on-its-own power source for hippie, off-the-grid commune types. But in fact today’s solar system works as simply another generator built into the existing power grid.

The parking structure’s solar system, which has been up and running for more than a month, will be officially dedicated the morning of Aug. 7 at its Salem and Third Street location.

Lane Green is the city engineer who’s helped put together the system, which is located on the top of the parking structure and does double duty shading the cars parked there. He’s been with the city a little more than a year and had no experience with solar prior to this project. He’s had to learn on the job. As a civil engineer, he’s enthusiastic when he talks solar.

“It works off the white light of the sun, not the heat,” he said. “In fact, the panels become less effective with increased heat. The most efficient days for operation come in the spring and the fall, when the air is cleaner, there are clearer days and they are cooler.”

The project cost $703,000, but the city will get about half of that back in rebates from a program, signed into law by Gov. Davis in 2000, called the Self-Generation Incentive Program, which offers $125 million per year to those who install alternative-energy systems.

Pacific Gas & Electric facilitates the funding, which means the money comes out of your monthly PG&E bill. The power company puts restrictions on what sort of system gets the rebate. For instance, the solar panels must be on-site to qualify for the rebate. That presents a problem in that not all roofs will accommodate the space needed for an adequate-sized panel array.

Over time the panels will pay for themselves with the money they save the city in electric bills. The period of payback depends on how fast the cost of electricity increases in the future—the faster the climb, the quicker the payoff.

Originally the city looked at all 256 city properties or facilities that have PG&E meter locations for possible solar projects. Most were ruled out due to sunlight obstructions or other physical limitations.

One interesting paradox is the fact that the city has an abundance of large, mature trees that do not mix well with solar panels, unless they can be mounted above the tree line. This could provide a potential quandary for local environmentalists: Should the city cut down big trees in order to install solar panels?

In the end 28 locations, including the city’s fire stations, police facilities, water treatment plant and airport facilities, have proved most promising.

“It’s positive all the way around if it’s done right,” said Green. “If you don’t do your research, you’ll get a system that is too expensive or you’ll end up cutting down a lot of trees.”

Even though the PG&E rebate system at this time says panels must be on-site, Stemen says hooking into the existing electrical grid—the million of miles of power lines that run over our heads and underground—opens up endless opportunities.

“By using the grid we don’t have to put panels on the site where we need them,” he said. “What would be really great would be to find some forward-thinking leaders in the community and say, ‘We’ll pay for the solar. We want the energy. We just need a place to put it.’ There are a million square feet of roof space [on the buildings of] the Chico Unified School District.

“The grid on top of the parking structure could run about 15 houses. My sense is that at Parkview Elementary School you could run the school and the surrounding neighborhood or just the school and credit the energy to another business.”

Here is how the system works: As the panels begin producing energy from the sun in the morning, the dial on the electrical meter begins to slow because less and less power from the conventional source is needed. Eventually, the meter stops and starts spinning the other way, meaning power is actually flowing back to PG&E. That is where the savings come into play. However, don’t expect PG&E to write a check if the panels end up sending more power to the utility than it sends to the building they sit on. The best you can do is reach zero, meaning you owe PG&E nothing—the utility benefits from whatever excess electricity it banks from on-site solar panels.

Richard Prater, the Butte County facilities manager, is retiring next month after 22 years, 15 as manager. The 62-year-old Prater is an electrician by trade and came to Butte County after a stint working for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He looks like the actor Christopher Lloyd and says he is an auto racing fan—in particular, the NASCAR circuit. On the day the News & Review talked with him he was wearing a white polo shirt emblazoned with the Bristol, Tenn., Speedway logo on the chest.

Prater’s office is in the old county hospital building, part of a group of structures that sit east of the county buildings on County Center Drive. The hospital was constructed under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration in the 1930s. It is built like a battleship, complete with turret. In fact it was designed, Prater said, by an architect who was also an ex-Navy man.

The old building complex sits to the south and east of the newer administration building that houses the Board of Supervisors’ chambers and county offices, the courthouse building, Juvenile Hall, the Sheriff’s Office and both wings of the county jail.

In Prater’s parking lot workers are installing an array of solar panels that will work in conjunction with a second array just north of the jail parking lot that will generate electricity to power the administration building.

There is another array of panels that sits between Highway 70 and the west wing of the jail that will power that facility. A third project is mounted on top of the east wing of the jail.

When the project is completed, and the switch is flipped on, most likely in early September, the system will become the nation’s fifth-largest solar-power generator, with 3,038 panels cranking out 997 kilowatts of electricity. It cost $8.4 million, but on the day it’s turned on, PG&E will hand the county a $4.2 million rebate, the largest yet.

The county also received a $4 million loan from the California Energy Commission. It carries a 3.5 percent interest rate if the project is completed by December, which it almost certainly will be.

Prater said the system will save about $316,000 annually and the loan will be fully paid off in 13 years.

“We’ve been very energy conscious for years,” Prater said in an interview in his office a few weeks ago. “Facilities Services has received a number of awards over the years from PG&E and other organizations.”

Prater said his office completed a $2.5 million energy management program back in 1996 that allows him, using his computer, to “go to any of the buildings and tweak the thermostats.”

“None of the buildings are controlled locally; they are all controlled from this office.” Prater said. “We control all heating and AC from here. We got a national award back in ‘96-'97 because it was high-tech stuff at the time.”

Prater added that when County Administrative Officer Paul McIntosh was hired a couple of years ago, he said he wanted the facilities office to reevaluate its energy program and see if there were any projects it wanted to start.

Prater said his office put out a proposal, and a number of energy management companies responded, but none to Prater’s satisfaction.

“We retained one, and they wanted us to get into cogeneration,” he explained. “That is where you take a large diesel engine, burn natural gas in it, recover the heat and use electricity.

“I’ve been around too much machinery all my life, and I know these are high maintenance. You still have to worry about fuel, [and the] only place you can really use heat is during the winter. I couldn’t get enthusiastic about it.”

In November 2002 the Sewerage Commission Oroville Region went on-line with its solar project, and Prater said he was sold on his first visit.

“There were all these fields of [solar] arrays, and there was nobody out there working on it. The electrical meter was going backward. There was no noise, no fuel, no pollution. I thought it was a winner all the way.”

The county building project began in the latter part of April. Prater said he had hoped to start in March but the paperwork involved for the rebate proved to be a daunting task.

The company hired to do the job, Sun Power, is based in Rohnert Park but has offices in Oroville because the vice president lives there. Ninety percent of the construction force to do the job was hired locally.

“That means we kept the money right here,” Prater said. “At times they’ve had work forces of 40 to 50 people down here, all at prevailing wage.”

Prater said he is very proud of this project even though he may not be here when the media are invited out take photos of the PG&E representative handing an oversized check to county officials.

“For a long time I will hold the record for spending money in Butte County,” he said. “We sent out the notice to proceed on March 24 and within 150 days we’ll be done. We spent $8.4 million in 150 days. That’s pretty good.

“Other than the paperwork, which has been massive, the vendor has been great to work with and everything is on time. It’s the best project I’ve ever worked on. In 22 years I’ve built a lot of buildings, and this has been a sweetheart deal. I will walk away from this feeling very good.”

For their part, Nguyen-Tan and Stemen are also optimistic about the future of solar and other renewable energies in the Northstate.

“There are so many moving pieces,” Nguyen-Tan said. “Everyone is thinking about doing something like this. We are trying to consolidate the expertise so if some other entity or individual wants to do a renewable-energy project, they know there is a particular group they can go to rather than relying on a bunch of consultants trying to sell them something.”

Their group has already received a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency for Stemen’s students. The NSRE has also partnered with Great Valley Center, a Modesto-based nonprofit founded in 1997 to promote environmental and economic concerns in the Sacramento Valley. That partnership has received a $50,000 planning grant from the Department of Energy.

Stemen has no doubts about the future of solar.

“Environmental concerns are going to drive up the cost of energy,” he predicted. “Look how behavior has changed now that gas prices have doubled. What’s going to happen when energy prices double?”

The time to act, he said, is now, while the rebates are still available. Homeowners are also qualified for the rebates for home solar installation, which generally pays for itself in four to six years.

“The whole idea with the government rebate program was to stimulate the industry with rebates, and every year the rebates get a little smaller,” Stemen said. “The cost of the technology is dropping, and it is getting better. The first generation of panels captured 15 percent [of the available energy]. Second-generation [panels] are now capturing 30 percent. There is a third generation coming down the line that will capture 80 percent.”

Stemen said what’s convinced him that solar is the real deal is the fact that some of the first businesses installing solar are gas stations.

“It is interesting that the gas companies are solarizing first,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, we know where this is going; we see the prices. Let the schmucks keep buying our product. We’re not going to use our gas to power our place.’ That to me is the telling sign.”

Nguyen-Tan said that, while he’s encouraged by those projects about to come on line, he’s more excited about what lies ahead.

“What we are hoping is that with what is happening in Butte County we can spread that type of expertise throughout the region,” he said.

But it is still a leap of faith for a business or homeowner to buy into the solar revolution. At this point, the technology is not the sticking point—it’s getting people on board.

“I think if I were a business the best way to do it would be to pair up with the school district and all that roof space," said Stemen. "Where better than over the heads of our children, the generation that is going to inherit this planet?"